


Bora

by aderyn



Series: Deep Map [10]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Reunions, The Adventure of the Empty House, homecomings, ill winds and otherwise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-12
Updated: 2012-09-12
Packaged: 2017-11-14 02:56:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/510572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The wind that swept away the Visigoths doesn’t blow in London.</p>
<p>It brings him in, though, detritus kicked up out of the northeast.</p>
<p>It blows him home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bora

**Author's Note:**

> “The bora is a cold and typically dry and gusty katabatic wind (fall-wind) from the northeast... The bora is most common blowing down from the mountains on the eastern side of the Adriatic Sea where it flows mainly from the northeast through gaps in the Dinaric Alps.”-weatheronlineuk
> 
> This is for [Moranion.](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Moranion/pseuds/Moranion)

_“The wind is going over everything tonight, proofing for error.”—A. Goldbarth, “A Theory of Wind.”_

 

The wind that swept away the Visigoths doesn’t blow in London.

It sweeps over the pine-pocked islands that lodge, glittering, in the craw of the Adriatic, turning the sea to needles and ice, tipping the pins with longing.

It was a way to shake, to move, to disappear-- a trick--with the glittering cast of the sea.

It found him wanting in seven countries.

It blows him home.

It brings him in, detritus kicked up out of the northeast.

It carries him home.

  *******

At long lost, at last, a lost resort.

“I’m the last thing you want,” he says. (While elsewhere altogether Sally fingers her hair, picks grit from her eyes, and Molly looks out the window of a bus, adjusts her scarf and thinks shit, what’s come; it wasn’t windy when I left the house.)

The _chiara_ / _scura_ of the skies, he thinks, cyclone and anti-, _bora_ , _burja_ , humours, dyscrasia...the currents fetched him and he’s so tired.  Dreamt last night of Alaric and the Tower of the Winds.

“You look,” John says at last, “wasted.”

He does. He knows it. You don’t sweep out the spiderlings without catching the loops of strangling silk, those last casts, yourself.

“I don’t live here anymore,” he says. And though he doesn’t live here anymore, John makes him lie down under the eaves (are these eaves; he doesn’t know). Asks in a calm voice about the shaking, brings something for it.  And in the morning John cuts some things loose and goes out for a think, comes back.

_The wind blows all night; it did the night you died, it does now. It howled the night you told me a story, an unsolved case; you let me have it, what you’d never told anyone; the next day the streets were littered with…verbs, and I became...what I became for a time, with you._

_It howled on the moor, out of the west I think, but at the pool, that night, it was so very still. I remember that now._

_When you were a child._

_When I was a child._

_What were we afraid of then._

*******

Mycroft has never hung anything on a line in his life, not literally. But his dream’s of his little brother’s coat, a shade meant to be worn, twisting on its pins, on its line, the wind twisting and shivering through an empty house.

What I’d give, he thinks, waking, for a good North American _chinook_ , the _shamal_ of the Gulf, the _seistan_ of the Afghan desert, the sweet southwesterlies of home...  

A good day to come home.

*******

Lestrade hammers nails. The wind mucks up the tape. A crime happens, and another, the kind that depend on dark, on weather. The wind ruins the scene for evidence. Kicks the incompetence up a notch, pisses everyone off.

“Bring your tricky fingers back, Sherlock,” says Lestrade to himself. “Lift things from my pockets.”

I never called you a whirlwind.

*******

Deduction’s  like erosion, he thinks, exhausted; you get into the structures; you work your way in. Clothes flipping, _wrong_ , hair lifting, _wrong_ , worried and worn down like stone, like sand, so _dull_...and sad.

*******

In public, John knows, as he walks, we don’t know ourselves.  All the domestic light goes out and we bow, courtly as pigeons in the square, eager as they are to please, to beak, to meet.  The light embrace, the kiss, then wings lift us and the square retreats beneath our recognition.

Meeting my familiar. Fuck. Why’d you do this to me.  Unsettled.  Snot on my sleeve. Undignified and bucking the grain, fucking gunless. Defenseless, not nailed down, bent like a tree.

Look what blew in across the Channel. Oh, it’s you. _It’s you._

And dusk comes gray and sweet.

*******

“I’ll take you there sometime,” Sherlock says, “I‘d take you to the islands.  I mean, if you like.”

“If I’d like you to hold still,” John says, “would you?”

“Can’t,” Sherlock says. “But I’ll try.” John’s got one finger on his eyebrow and two on his pulse, one hand on his bag and the other on his gun; he’s slipped somehow between lines on the compass, a fine compromise.

“North by northeast,” Sherlock says, without meaning to.  John thinks, _his hands are cold, his head’s cold; he needs to be warmed, restored, and I’m not..._

Damn I’m not. Flung like a bloody shingle.

There’s such a lot to do. The thing to do is worrying, worrying, at the windows, at the shutters, at the shades. There’s the knifeslice and the windstrike, the beetle-kill and blowdown (of the soul, of the soul). There isn’t much but time and seasons that can cure those, Sherlock thinks, but your hands --glittering wind, swept clean--come close.

 

**Author's Note:**

> [The bora wind](http://www.weatheronline.co.uk/reports/wind/The-Bora.htm)
> 
> [ High-res mapping of bora](http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2010/2009JC005524.shtml)
> 
> [Pine bent by the bora wind](http://www.flickr.com/photos/12059976@N05/1780124958/)
> 
>  [London wind forecast map](http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/public/weather/forecast/?tab=map&map=Wind&locId=352409&zoom=7)
> 
>  [The Tower of the Winds, Roman Agora, Athens](http://www.sailingissues.com/yachting-guide/tower-of-winds-1.html)
> 
>  
> 
> The wind deities: Boreas (N), Kaikias (NE), Eurus (E), Apeliotes (SE), Notus (S), Livas (SW), Zephyrus (W), and Skiron (NW)
> 
>  
> 
> “But let us swear: When rocks shall swim, and the Po shall wash the tops of Matinus, and the Appenine be cast into the sea...then we shall return to our home.”--Horace


End file.
